Canon S90: First Impressions

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be over in New York for a few days so as usual I headed to the ever wonderful B & H on 32nd/9th to check out the latest cameras. It transpired that the PhotoPlus exhibition was on round the corner, which meant the store was busy even by their standards as many smiley faced photographers wandered round what is, for most of us, some kind of photo heaven!

My goal on this visit was simple.. either bite the bullet and get the wonderful Canon 5D Mk II, Canon’s full frame SLR camera that has been getting rave reviews and has been incredibly hard to get until now, or to find a replacement for my beloved Canon G7 - ideally a pocket camera something more akin to the Yashica T4 Super (a great little point and shoot film camera). After some drooling at the Canon demo stand over the 5D Mk II, a glance at the Canon G11
and a brief fight to get a look at the new Canon 7D
- a very random release indeed that seems to be focussed on HD video more than photography - I plumped for getting a new point and shoot.

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Search for Matching Images Online

A new site, TinEye, has been launched in Beta that lets you search for images that match, or match part of, a source image you provide. This differs hugely from Google’s text based image search which relies on the person uploading an image and putting appropriate keywords around the image to help find it.

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Camera Battery Life: Keep Batteries Healthy

In our post the other day we suggested a few tips on how to extend the life of your digital camera battery while taking photos. In an ideal world every battery would last forever, but we all know that isn’t yet the case. In fact with older digital camera batteries you may have started to notice that they don’t last as long as they used to. In many cases this will get so bad that you have to buy new batteries, which often aren’t cheap, but once you get them you realise how bad your old batteries were. Plus that means we’re throwing away old batteries that contain many environmentally unfriendly chemicals - less than wonderufl.

So how can we maximise the lifespan and capacity of our camera batteries? Read on for some hints…

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Camera Battery Life: Extending During Use

In the world of digital photography how long your battery lasts is a big issue. Whereas old school film cameras tended to use easily replaceable standard size batteries, digital cameras tend to have their own, proprietary rechargable batteries which, while they tend to last a long time, are tricky to quickly replace while out and about. Digital cameras also suck battery life much more quickly than their elder film brethren, simply because they have so many more electrical parts to manage - preview screens, storing to memory cards and giving you all those amazing face focussing functions. So how do you ensure you get the most shots out of your battery when out and about?

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Canon Announce G11 and PowerShot S90

Canon have made a couple of announcements in their small digital camera range - an update to the Canon G-Series, the G11, and the firing up of the S-Series again after a haitus of 3 years with the new Canon Powershot S90.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of Canon cameras. They have consistently introduced feature sets and cameras that most photographers fall over themselves to own for very different reasons. Their latest prosumer SLR, the Canon 5D Mk II is an example of that customer focus - a camera released last year that even now, six months in, is harder to buy than gold dust from the huge demand.

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